strange and random happenstance

Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor by Stephanie Barron
Published by: Bantam
Publication Date: 1996
Format: Paperback, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

A cache of documents has been found. Could it be true that Jane Austen, that famous Regency writer, solved crimes when she wasn't writing her novels and sent the tales off to her nieces? Because that is what appears to be the case as Jane writes about what happened when she went to Scargrave Manor. Jane had just broken off her hastily made and even more hastily ended engagement to Harris Bigg-Wither. She had been lured in by the idea of a home and a family, but in the end realized that her and Harris Bigg-Wither would not suit. Needing to be elsewhere and not wanting the recriminations of her family Jane decides to visit her dear friend Isobel Payne. Jane and Isobel had became acquainted when the younger lady came to England from Barbados looking for a husband with her aunt and cousin in tow. She found a match in the older Earl of Scargrave. In fact they have just returned home from their honeymoon on the continent and are to have a lavish ball to celebrate their nuptials at their country seat. Jane arrives the night of the festivities, her friend seems happy, her new husband full of joy, but Isobel's husband takes a turn as the evening wears on. All assume it's just an attack of indigestion. He has seen a London doctor for a few years for his complaint. That doctor is summoned to the Earl's bedside and arrives in time to watch him die. How can Isobel be a widow in the early hours after her bridal ball? If all this wasn't bad enough, Isobel receives a poison pen letter saying that she did kill her husband because she is the lover of the new Earl, formerly the Viscount Payne! How could anyone say she was unfaithful to her husband with his heir? Yes, she secretly admits to Jane that they were in love, but she never acted on her feelings. But things look dire for the two. Yes, Jane could point the finger at George Hearst, the Earl's nephew who argued with him the night of his death, or Thomas Hearst, George's brother who was in a spot of bother. And what about Lord Harold Trowbridge? Arriving to torment Isobel because he wants her property in Barbados. There are too many suspects but only two with motive and means according to the law. So it is up to Jane to save her dear friend and find the real killer.

I find Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James very problematic. James obviously wanted to write a book on the oddities of Georgian and Regency law and quickly realized no one would want to read it so added a thin veneer of Jane Austen in order to trick us Janeites into reading her abysmal law treatise. If only she had done her research and realized her concept had been accomplished fifteen years prior far more successfully on every front, from understanding the trial process to actually making it about Jane Austen, by Stephanie Barron. Because a book about Jane Austen or her characters should be about her first and foremost and Stephanie got that. What amazes me is that Stephanie's long running series dropped at just the right time. America's obsession with Austen is dated firmly to 1996; Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility won all the awards, there were two versions of Emma, one on the small screen and one on the large, and who can forget Colin Firth and his wet shirt? Into this mix Stephanie Barron published her first Jane Austen mystery. So yes, I feel a little late to the party picking up the first book now, but at least this means I have a large back catalog to enjoy! Though it did take me awhile to warm to this murder mystery conceit. The bare bones are exactly the kind of book I dream of, a murder at a county estate during Christmas where everyone in the family is a suspect. But it took awhile to click because of two reasons; the footnotes and Austen's voice. So, this book has footnotes as part of the conceit that these events really happened to Jane and they are uncovered letters and journals. Therefore the footnotes are for clarity because in 1996 not many people were as Austen obsessed or Austen literate as now. So I found them intrusive and unnecessary, until I started to learn some interesting facts, so accepted them. As for Austen's voice, Barron perfectly captures it, it's just that where my brain was at when I started the book I wasn't sharp enough to enjoy it and therefore found it a hurdle that I had to overcome. But once the second murder happened it's like everything clicked into place. And I realized that it was the victim of the second crime that really did it for me because as I get older I have come to realize how much enjoyment I get out of the murder of uppity lady's maids. The Gilded Age really brought this home to me this year. In other words, kill the right person and I'm a happy camper.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Christmas, Colin Firth, Death Comes to Pemberley, Emma, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, Jane Austen, Lady's Maid, Murder, P.D. James, Regency Romp, Sense and Sensibility, Stephanie Barron

The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman
Published by: Speak
Publication Date: December 14th, 2015
Format: Paperback, 544 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

When Lady Helen Wrexhall's parents died she thought that would be the biggest upset to her life. Her and her brother became orphans on the suffrage of their Aunt and Uncle Pennworth and life moved on. On the eve of her presentation to the Queen, Lady Helen assumed the only stumbling block to making a good match and avoiding a scene in front of royalty would be the lingering scandal of being the daughter of Lady Catherine, the Countess of Hayden, a traitor to the crown, but she was wrong. Lady Helen's life is about to change irrevocably and the only hint she has is her friend Delia Cransdon being ruined. Helen has always had an uncanny knack of reading people and she knows her Aunt Leonore is hiding something from her. Because the story will be the talk of the town Aunt Leonore agrees to tell everything to Helen as a warning and also because she has a love for the dramatic and Gothic. After two unsuccessful seasons Delia ran off with a man named Trent three days prior. Instead of heading to Scotland and an elopement, they were found in Sussex. Mr. Trent shot himself in the head and as he died, according to a groom from a nearby public house, he was lit from within. Mr. Trent must have been a ghoul to leave poor Delia ruined and covered in his blood.

Helen's first instinct is to rush to Delia's side but her Aunt makes it very clear that all of society has cut poor Delia and that Pennworth in particular will have no whiff of anything untoward happening to Helen. So Helen must go forward with her plans for the season. Presentations and balls and card parties and calling on friends, all while forsaking a dear friend for the sake of respectability. Yet her Uncle Pennworth has a secret, his side of the family also has a notorious member, Lord Carlston, who fled England three years prior because he was accused of murdering his wife. The fact that her body was never found didn't much matter to society. On the day of her presentation Lady Helen and Lord Carlston's paths will cross and he will take something very precious from her, a portrait of her mother, a portrait she foolishly brought to court because who brings the picture of a traitor when being presented to the Queen? Yet the Queen hints that perhaps all of society is wrong about Lady Catherine. There are so many questions swirling about in Helen's mind she soon realizes that the only one who might have any answers is Lord Carlston. As the two get to know each other she realizes the world is full of monsters and she was put on earth to destroy them. But will her destiny destroy her future?

The way the magic systems work in the Regency Magic genre can be broadly placed in three categories. The first and most common is that everyone knows about magic. Magic is a part of everyday life and it's just accepted and we get on with our story. The second is that the knowledge of magic is held by a select few, sometimes secret societies, sometimes families, but our heroine, and let me here point out that in Regency Magic it is almost always a heroine, is already in the know but gets drawn further into the magical world over the course of her story. The third and rarest category is the one in which our heroine is completely oblivious to magic and is thrust into this new world with no prerequisite knowledge and has to learn everything. The Dark Days Club falls into this rarefied third category and it made me giddy. Over the years of devouring books written in the Regency Magic genre it's very rare that a book or series feels fresh. They are usually just reassembling the same building blocks into a new and lovely picture, but it's still the basic building blocks. Here though I felt revitalized! Here was something new! Instead of being annoyed reading exposition about the already known magical system here we were on the journey with Helen learning all about Deceivers and Reclaimers and it made the book that much more visceral a read.

Alison Goodman doubled down on the originality in that instead of going to the fairy standby she chose a different path. Again, not that I have anything against fairies, with the time period they make sense with the romanticizing of the time period, but sometimes it's nice to not have fairies if you know what I mean. The Dark Days Club is far more demonic. This is why I really loved this book, it was Regency Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And if you're not rushing to the bookstore to pick this series up with that one sentence, I'm sorry, but I don't think we can be friends. Helen becomes a chosen one, she's a Reclaimer, like her mother before her, that has been gifted with supernatural powers, such as increased strength and hearing, and that habit of her of reading people? Well that would be so she can figure out what people are really Deceivers in disguise. Because Deceivers are the name given to the four kinds of demons in Helen's world. And what I really think is clever about naming them Deceivers is that it ties back into the Prince of Darkness, Satan himself, the Prince of Lies, the Great Deceiver himself! There's just so much more at stake when the upcoming war of good versus evil isn't again Napoleon or some fairies but is against the very denizens of hell.

This willingness to embrace the darkness of the Regency period is what sets this book completely apart from all other books I've read in this genre. When people think of the Regency period they think of Jane Austen whose writing has a universality to it. Yet to me sometimes making a book precisely about the time period is even more of an escape. And instead of just sticking to the broad strokes most authors do, such as Napoleon, with a few daring to expand to the social unrest of the time, we get specificity for 1812. We get to see the social unrest through the Luddite riots in the north, we see the dark underbelly of Regency England, we see the pee cups that girls about to be presented used behind screens at court when they were about to be presented to the Queen. And seriously, those pee cups answered a lot of questions I've had over the years wondering if people just had larger bladders in the 1800s... because me and that pee cup would have become very good friends what with my nerves. Though for me the part that had me wringing my hands with almost maniacal glee was the inclusion of the Ratcliff Highway Murders. These gruesome real life crimes have captivated people from those like Helen and possibly even Jane Austen herself who would have devoured the tale in the penny press to mystery writer P.D. James who wrote about them in The Maul and the Pear Tree. And as I'm sure you know, I love me a good true crime. This combination of fantasy and reality is what really sets The Dark Days Club apart.

Yet none of this would matter if the book didn't have characters we love and hate. Despite the fact I could probably rage against Helen's Uncle Pennworth for hours I will instead concentrate on my favorite character, Helen's lady's maid, Darby. Darby is the heart of this book. Not only does she ground the narrative for us readers by asking the questions of Lady Helen we would as if we were in her shoes, such as are Lady Helen's powers evil, but she drives the narrative with her coming to terms with this new world order. For Darby it all starts out small, worrying about one of the house maids who has gone missing, and this one question, this one small investigation, catapults her and Lady Helen into this new world. What's more, once a part of this world she doesn't question the rightness of it. For every Reclaimer, they have an assistant they share their powers with, their Terrene. This person grounds them, quite literally, and that is what I connect to with Darby. She is so practical, so down-to-earth, that she is the perfect sidekick, companion, Terrene, to Lady Helen. Plus her tendre that she develops for Lord Carlston's Terrene Quinn, for me, this is the true love story of the book. Not Helen and her choosing between Lord Carlston and her brother's best friend the Duke, it's all about Darby and Quinn, two people whose place in life might have precluded finding love.

Finally though I have to go a little off book, well not so much off book as to another book... Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery to be precise. This book holds a special place in my heart because my binge of Michael Crichton's oeuvre is really what made me the reader I am today. There are so many memorable scenes in that book that were later brought to life in Crichton's own adaptation starring Sean Connery that I will forever think of them as the pinnacle of a successful action sequence. One such scene that worked just as successfully on the page as on the screen is when our delightful villains have to break a snakesman out of Newgate Prison using a public hanging as distraction. This scene is a scene that I don't think will ever leave me for how taunt if made every nerve in my body. Therefore I was very excited when the action of The Dark Days Club took us to a public hanging at Newgate Prison, and not just a fictional hanging, but the execution of John Bellingham who had assassinated the Prime Minster Spencer Perceval. This melding of reality and fiction was just perfect and the taut action took me right back to the time when I first read The Great Train Robbery. The crush of the crowd, the frenzy, the mania, all of it came together perfectly to not only make me remember why I love reading so much but why I love this book so much. I seriously can not wait for the next installment!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alison Goodman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Deceivers, Demons, Lady Helen, Michael Crichton, P.D. James, Ratcliff Highway Murders, Reclaimers, Regency Magic, The Dark Days Club, The Great Train Robbery, True Crime

The Lake House by Kate Morton
Published by: Atria Books
Publication Date: October 20th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 512 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Midsummer has always been celebrated at Loeanneth with a grand gala. The lake house is strewn with lanterns and gondolas float on the river with fireworks dazzling the night sky above the great bonfire. While the Edevane family might enjoy their solitude in Cornwall, they still keep this tradition alive. It is 1933 and this will be the last year the family holds this celebration. Soon the house will be shuttered and it will be a time capsule of that night; the night everything changed. Young Alice Edevane would usually be reveling in these festivities, but this year is different. She no longer has time for Mr. Llewellyn, artist in resident and family friend, or her mother who wants her to help with preparations. She only has time for two things, plotting her first mystery novel and Ben. Ben is the gardener and she fancies herself in love with him. He listens raptly when she tells him about her book and talks to her like an equal. But could her book be what destroyed everything? Because in the wee hours of the night her baby brother Theo was taken from his crib. Seventy years later the case remains unsolved. Alice is now a successful mystery writer but she has never resolved what happened to her baby brother. Enter Sadie Sparrow. She's on leave from the MET with a forced vacation in Cornwall at her grandfather's house. Yet she can't sit still. Sadie stumbles on Loeanneth and the cold case consumes her. Will a fresh set of eyes find the truth of that long ago midsummer night?

There are times in your life when you just need to get away from reality and hide in a book. Sometimes it works and you fall into the story and it consumes you. Other times it backfires on you and all the troubles you were trying to escape are reflected back at you through this medium. Not only is the book too close for comfort, but once you put it down you'll be faced with reality again. Which is the situation I found myself in with Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, leading to me not being one of the worshipful majority. But that's another story for another time. When I finally picked up The Lake House it was precisely the book I needed at just the right time. It had just enough mystery with just the right level of predictability that I wanted to stay there as long as possible. I usually devour a book in a matter of days, but here I spent a week, taking my time and having a well deserved respite from reality. I languished at Loeanneth. The book became so much a part of me that I dreamt of Cornwall. I remember quite vividly being in the half-dream state where I wasn't quite fully awake but I had already started to leave my dream behind and hearing the garbage trucks making their morning rounds. The beeps were confusing and incongruous to me. There was still a part of me that knew they were garbage trucks, but my thoughts were consumed with the fact they didn't belong. The technology didn't exist yet and they would never spoil the idyll that was the lake house, because that is where I was. I haven't had this kind of dream disassociation since years ago when I thought some crop dusters were Messerschmidt's, again another story for another time.

Kate Morton's books aren't for everyone. In fact they only occasionally work for me. They spend loving detail on atmosphere and if you are more interested in narrative, well you can feel like you are languishing in a story with no forward momentum. The mysteries Morton concocts are very pedestrian. Her own creation, Alice Edevane, would weep for their simplicity. In fact the only thing that didn't ring true to me in The Lake House is that Alice Edevane is this grand dame of mystery writers the likes of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell yet she was never able to solve this mystery in her own life. Yes, you could say it's because she didn't want to know the truth, but that seems cliched. But the truth you need to remember in Morton's book is the mystery is always secondary. Yes, she did a better job this time of spacing out the clues so just when you thought nothing would progress, bam, new evidence showed up on the scene. That doesn't mean I didn't figure it out hundreds of pages earlier, but I liked the pacing. I also liked the characters, I felt like they were more fleshed out in this tale. Morton likes to have the old lady with these wonderful stories and secrets that must be passed on or solved by younger generations. It's her thing, it's her trope. But here Alice was so alive. She was the spark that kept things together. She's a spunky old lady who plays her cards close to her chest, and I just loved that. Instead of a dead aunt, a mother on her deathbed, or an old lady in a nursing home, the elderly lady this time around was active not passive and it made a huge difference.

While having the disappearance of the one Edevane son as the fulcrum this book is really about women. Particularly the bond between mothers and daughters and all the shapes and forms these bonds come in. I liked that we had mothers who knew the best thing for their child was to let them go, while also having mothers so selfish they pushed their daughter away for the sake of their own appearance. It really cast a light on the fact that there's not just one single and simple way that mothers and daughters interact. People are so different and to assume that their relationships are all the same is folly. What is also interesting is to see how the mother daughter relationship is formed by experience and also by society's conventions and how those conventions have changed over time. The relationship between Alice's mother and grandmother, women of the previous century, was more staid and reserved, because of the time and also a tragedy Alice's grandmother endured. Going forward Alice's mother wants to have a better relationship with her own daughters but realizes that her husband stands in the way of her being the "fun" parent and therefore sadly accepts her fate. Then we look to Sadie and how her own mother threw her out because Sadie got pregnant and opted to give the baby up for adoption. Just a few women, and yet their relationships are so complex and we are given insight into each one, we get to understand if not empathize with how they lived and loved.

But if I'm honest what really intrigued me with The Lake House was the real life parallels. Theo's disappearance has parallels to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which the book doesn't shy away from pointing out. There's something about these unsolved crimes that echo down the generations and draw us in and therefore make for great inclusions in fiction. As for my Lindbergh baby obsession, it's not as bad as my Jack the Ripper obsession, though both make me wish I could time travel just to solve unsolved crime. The thing is Lindbergh went to the same university as me and I can actually see the house where he lived from my office window. As for the kidnapping, I saw a riveting one person play on the convicted kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann that has always stuck with me. Though it wasn't just the Lindbergh allusions that I loved. Mr. Llewellyn and his children's book based on Alice's mother had so much Lewis Carroll in it I could sqwee for joy. Plus Morton played with our preconceptions based on this real life connection. She threw suspicion on Mr. Llewellyn but also called into question his relationship with the family, much as Carroll's was with the Liddells. Oh, and to hark back to those great dames of detection, there's more than a little Anne Perry in Alice Edevane. Of course Anne Perry's childhood crime of murdering her best friend's mother prior to becoming a bestselling crime writer was immortalized in the wonderful film Heavenly Creatures. This crime occurred in New Zealand, a stone throws from Morton's Australia. The idea that Alice might somehow be guilty and therefore an unreliable narrator, I can't tell you how much I loved this. Also the Mitford parallels, with Deborah, Alice, and Clemmie Edevane mirroring Diana, Nancy, and Jessica Mitford respectively was just the cherry on top of the sundae.

The only real problem I had with the entire book was Sadie Sparrow. While you might think it's a hatred of her pigheadedness and her just not really listening to people, it has nothing to do with that, I could overlook that as character flaws. My problem is her name: Sadie Sparrow. I'm sure when everyone first saw the Doctor Who episode "Blink" written by Steven Moffat they all thought that Sally Sparrow was the coolest name ever and were wishing that they had thought of it first. I know I did and I'm a reviewer not a writer! In fact my handle on my knitting site actually is Sally Sparrow, I am unashamed of my geekiness and I fully admit it. It's such a unique and distinctive name that once you hear it you can't ever forget it. Now here we have Sadie Sparrow. She's like a weak imitation, a bad knock off, a wannabe Sally but alwaysbe Sadie. Why would you EVER choose this as your characters name? Why would an editor ever let you do it? Yes the name might seem perfectly acceptable to you, the author, but it's not. This name wasn't your invention. To make matters worse Sally and her friend Kathy joke about being investigators, Sparrow and Nightingale! A bit ITV, but I'd still watch it. And here's "Sadie" being all investigative and then a PI! I'm sorry. This is just unacceptable. You could argue it's coincidence, that Kate Morton has never even seen Doctor Who. Guess what? I don't care. Yes her book has lots of real life connections and allusions, but she makes them her own. If it was a original thought or Sally just became Sadie, it's too close and MUST be changed. This isn't Moffat, it's Morton. And the last thing any writer wants to be is Moffat.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Anne Perry, Blink, Charles Lindbergh, Cornwall, Doctor Who, Downton Denial Denouement, Fangirl, Heavenly Creatures, Jack the Ripper, Kate Morton, Lewis Carroll, Mitfords, P.D. James, Steven Moffat, The Lake House

The Lake House by Kate Morton
Published by: Atria Books
Publication Date: October 20th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 512 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Midsummer has always been celebrated at Loeanneth with a grand gala. The lake house is strewn with lanterns and gondolas float on the river with fireworks dazzling the night sky above the great bonfire. While the Edevane family might enjoy their solitude in Cornwall, they still keep this tradition alive. It is 1933 and this will be the last year the family holds this celebration. Soon the house will be shuttered and it will be a time capsule of that night; the night everything changed. Young Alice Edevane would usually be reveling in these festivities, but this year is different. She no longer has time for Mr. Llewellyn, artist in resident and family friend, or her mother who wants her to help with preparations. She only has time for two things, plotting her first mystery novel and Ben. Ben is the gardener and she fancies herself in love with him. He listens raptly when she tells him about her book and talks to her like an equal. But could her book be what destroyed everything? Because in the wee hours of the night her baby brother Theo was taken from his crib. Seventy years later the case remains unsolved. Alice is now a successful mystery writer but she has never resolved what happened to her baby brother. Enter Sadie Sparrow. She's on leave from the MET with a forced vacation in Cornwall at her grandfather's house. Yet she can't sit still. Sadie stumbles on Loeanneth and the cold case consumes her. Will a fresh set of eyes find the truth of that long ago midsummer night?

There are times in your life when you just need to get away from reality and hide in a book. Sometimes it works and you fall into the story and it consumes you. Other times it backfires on you and all the troubles you were trying to escape are reflected back at you through this medium. Not only is the book too close for comfort, but once you put it down you'll be faced with reality again. Which is the situation I found myself in with Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, leading to me not being one of the worshipful majority. But that's another story for another time. When I finally picked up The Lake House it was precisely the book I needed at just the right time. It had just enough mystery with just the right level of predictability that I wanted to stay there as long as possible. I usually devour a book in a matter of days, but here I spent a week, taking my time and having a well deserved respite from reality. I languished at Loeanneth. The book became so much a part of me that I dreamt of Cornwall. I remember quite vividly being in the half-dream state where I wasn't quite fully awake but I had already started to leave my dream behind and hearing the garbage trucks making their morning rounds. The beeps were confusing and incongruous to me. There was still a part of me that knew they were garbage trucks, but my thoughts were consumed with the fact they didn't belong. The technology didn't exist yet and they would never spoil the idyll that was the lake house, because that is where I was. I haven't had this kind of dream disassociation since years ago when I thought some crop dusters were Messerschmidt's, again another story for another time.

Kate Morton's books aren't for everyone. In fact they only occasionally work for me. They spend loving detail on atmosphere and if you are more interested in narrative, well you can feel like you are languishing in a story with no forward momentum. The mysteries Morton concocts are very pedestrian. Her own creation, Alice Edevane, would weep for their simplicity. In fact the only thing that didn't ring true to me in The Lake House is that Alice Edevane is this grand dame of mystery writers the likes of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell yet she was never able to solve this mystery in her own life. Yes, you could say it's because she didn't want to know the truth, but that seems cliched. But the truth you need to remember in Morton's book is the mystery is always secondary. Yes, she did a better job this time of spacing out the clues so just when you thought nothing would progress, bam, new evidence showed up on the scene. That doesn't mean I didn't figure it out hundreds of pages earlier, but I liked the pacing. I also liked the characters, I felt like they were more fleshed out in this tale. Morton likes to have the old lady with these wonderful stories and secrets that must be passed on or solved by younger generations. It's her thing, it's her trope. But here Alice was so alive. She was the spark that kept things together. She's a spunky old lady who plays her cards close to her chest, and I just loved that. Instead of a dead aunt, a mother on her deathbed, or an old lady in a nursing home, the elderly lady this time around was active not passive and it made a huge difference.

While having the disappearance of the one Edevane son as the fulcrum this book is really about women. Particularly the bond between mothers and daughters and all the shapes and forms these bonds come in. I liked that we had mothers who knew the best thing for their child was to let them go, while also having mothers so selfish they pushed their daughter away for the sake of their own appearance. It really cast a light on the fact that there's not just one single and simple way that mothers and daughters interact. People are so different and to assume that their relationships are all the same is folly. What is also interesting is to see how the mother daughter relationship is formed by experience and also by society's conventions and how those conventions have changed over time. The relationship between Alice's mother and grandmother, women of the previous century, was more staid and reserved, because of the time and also a tragedy Alice's grandmother endured. Going forward Alice's mother wants to have a better relationship with her own daughters but realizes that her husband stands in the way of her being the "fun" parent and therefore sadly accepts her fate. Then we look to Sadie and how her own mother threw her out because Sadie got pregnant and opted to give the baby up for adoption. Just a few women, and yet their relationships are so complex and we are given insight into each one, we get to understand if not empathize with how they lived and loved.

But if I'm honest what really intrigued me with The Lake House was the real life parallels. Theo's disappearance has parallels to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which the book doesn't shy away from pointing out. There's something about these unsolved crimes that echo down the generations and draw us in and therefore make for great inclusions in fiction. As for my Lindbergh baby obsession, it's not as bad as my Jack the Ripper obsession, though both make me wish I could time travel just to solve unsolved crime. The thing is Lindbergh went to the same university as me and I can actually see the house where he lived from my office window. As for the kidnapping, I saw a riveting one person play on the convicted kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann that has always stuck with me. Though it wasn't just the Lindbergh allusions that I loved. Mr. Llewellyn and his children's book based on Alice's mother had so much Lewis Carroll in it I could sqwee for joy. Plus Morton played with our preconceptions based on this real life connection. She threw suspicion on Mr. Llewellyn but also called into question his relationship with the family, much as Carroll's was with the Liddells. Oh, and to hark back to those great dames of detection, there's more than a little Anne Perry in Alice Edevane. Of course Anne Perry's childhood crime of murdering her best friend's mother prior to becoming a bestselling crime writer was immortalized in the wonderful film Heavenly Creatures. This crime occurred in New Zealand, a stone throws from Morton's Australia. The idea that Alice might somehow be guilty and therefore an unreliable narrator, I can't tell you how much I loved this. Also the Mitford parallels, with Deborah, Alice, and Clemmie Edevane mirroring Diana, Nancy, and Jessica Mitford respectively was just the cherry on top of the sundae.

The only real problem I had with the entire book was Sadie Sparrow. While you might think it's a hatred of her pigheadedness and her just not really listening to people, it has nothing to do with that, I could overlook that as character flaws. My problem is her name: Sadie Sparrow. I'm sure when everyone first saw the Doctor Who episode "Blink" written by Steven Moffat they all thought that Sally Sparrow was the coolest name ever and were wishing that they had thought of it first. I know I did and I'm a reviewer not a writer! In fact my handle on my knitting site actually is Sally Sparrow, I am unashamed of my geekiness and I fully admit it. It's such a unique and distinctive name that once you hear it you can't ever forget it. Now here we have Sadie Sparrow. She's like a weak imitation, a bad knock off, a wannabe Sally but alwaysbe Sadie. Why would you EVER choose this as your characters name? Why would an editor ever let you do it? Yes the name might seem perfectly acceptable to you, the author, but it's not. This name wasn't your invention. To make matters worse Sally and her friend Kathy joke about being investigators, Sparrow and Nightingale! A bit ITV, but I'd still watch it. And here's "Sadie" being all investigative and then a PI! I'm sorry. This is just unacceptable. You could argue it's coincidence, that Kate Morton has never even seen Doctor Who. Guess what? I don't care. Yes her book has lots of real life connections and allusions, but she makes them her own. If it was a original thought or Sally just became Sadie, it's too close and MUST be changed. This isn't Moffat, it's Morton. And the last thing any writer wants to be is Moffat.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Anne Perry, Blink, Charles Lindbergh, Cornwall, Doctor Who, Downton Denial Denouement, Fangirl, Heavenly Creatures, Jack the Ripper, Kate Morton, Lewis Carroll, Mitfords, P.D. James, Steven Moffat, The Lake House

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
Published by: Alfred A. Knopf
Publication Date: July 7th, 2005
Format: Hardcover, 385 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and the second greatest writer of his age after Rudyard Kipling, and George Edalji, a half-caste solicitor from Birmingham whose Parsi father became a vicar in a small Staffordshire village, would unexpectedly change English law and bring about the court of appeal in England. As Arthur rose to fame, taking his family out of the gentle poverty of Edinburgh, getting married, having children, establishing his career, George had far smaller ambitions. He wanted to be a solicitor. He kept his head down and studied, being a decent, not excellent, student. Yet his life was full of strife. His family received hateful and horrible anonymous letters. The local police did nothing, and in fact suspected George of persecuting his own family. Yet George kept his life on track, going to college and then working for a firm in Birmingham, finally setting up his practice and even publishing a guide on railway law. The persecution eventually stopped and life seemed ready to go on as normal. Until the animal rippings started. Animals were attacked so viciously that they had to be euthanized due to their wounds. The local police decided that George was behind these crimes. They had no evidence, no logic, and yet George ended up spending three years of his life in prison. All he wanted was to be pardoned and for his simple life to begin again. Yet it wouldn't. Therefore George took the only drastic measure he ever did in his whole life, he wrote to the creator of Sherlock Holmes asking for his help. Arthur had just suffered the loss of his wife while also feeling guilty that during the past ten years he had loved another and was just waiting for propriety's sake till the day he could make Jean his bride. He was at the end of his rope with waiting and here came George with something to distract him. Arthur was willing to play the detective for the first time in his life, and hopefully George would get his name cleared when they were done.

Arthur and George is one of those books that have been sitting on my shelf for ages. Every time I reorganize my books I pick it up and think that now will be the time I read it, and it inevitably gets hidden in the back behind Barrie and Baum until the next reorganization. It might have taken me a decade, but I finally got around to Arthur and George, a book that I think is better in the abstract. There's lyrical and evocative prose, there's eventually a plot you connect to, but in the end I was more than a little dissatisfied. The book starts with little vignettes of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji growing up. Quickly cutting back and forth between the two in a way that at first is interesting but almost a hundred pages in gets on your nerves for it's gimmickry. You're reading and reading and the one thought that keeps going through your head is "when is it going to start?" Because these little glimpses, no matter how many are piled on top of each other, do not a narrative make. When we finally move into the second part of the book you have had your fill of exposition and when you realize that Arthur and George have yet to meet you start to wonder why bother? There was even a part of me thinking Julian Barnes was using Conan Doyle as a lure and it's going to be a bait and switch all over again like P.D. James and Death Comes to Pemberley. I sincerely thought about just setting aside this book because I couldn't take another story supposedly about one thing and then being forced to endure something else. Luckily the historical record proves that these two men met, so I was willing to hold onto that and push through. And meet they did, and that part was good, that part was something, that part was an all too brief 122 pages that could still have used some editing. So in here, there is a story. It's short, there's too much fluff, but that little bit might just be worth it. Maybe.

Besides this constant tease of a plot hopefully emerging the writing has another serious flaw. It might be beautiful, but it is also flat. It's like the book is on a slow and even keel on every single page. There is nothing pushing the narrative forward and nothing to elicit interest, it just is. One reason I fear is this lack of focus. Barnes is so busy showing us just little glimpses of these two men's lives that he loses the ability to know what is and isn't important. There is no drama, no crescendo. George being set to prison is about as dramatic as his daily commute to work. Barnes dwells on weird and unnecessary details instead of those points which could build the story. For example, you'd think he'd spend time on the ripping of the animals, it is after all the major crime in the book. He might talk about the fear this infuses in the community, the importance of livestock in these people's lives, or the docility of pit ponies in particular, but he doesn't. Instead we get a far more detailed description of Arthur Conan Doyle getting an erection and having premature ejaculation issues the first time he kisses the woman who is to become his second wife. So in the context of this book the heinous crime of animal ripping is second to Arthur Conan Doyle's dick. So why did you write this book Julian Barnes? Because to me it seems that a miscarriage of justice wasn't as important as dragging down the legacy of a writer second only to Kipling in his time.

This flatness carries over into the characterization of these two men making me have problems with both. Firstly there's the problem with George. George Edalji is supposed to be the victim here. The man who lost years of his life for a miscarriage of justice. We should like him. We should feel his plight. We shouldn't be hoping that they just keep him locked up because he is an annoying pretentious ass. So the problem with George is that you don't like him. You're hoping that there's some twist, that he has a split personality, that he has some animus to him that doesn't make the highlight of his life writing a book on railway law! That he's freakin' Jekyll and Hyding us all and IS a cold blooded animal killers. But no. He is a shell of a person. And not in the, he endured great tragedy and there was only a shell left. No, he isn't a full person. He does his work, he gets decent grades, he blindly goes through life as a nobody. If it wasn't for someone taking against him he would have been born and died and no one would have noticed. I can't decide if making George this nonentity was a way in which Barnes is showcasing that the crime George was charged with needed to be judged on the evidence not on the man. But we still need to have some connection to this man. We have to care about his fate, not focusing on the criminal procedures of the day, and yes I'm experiencing some P.D. James flashbacks right now. But the worst characteristic, the ONLY characteristic of George is his naivety. He doesn't think that he will be convicted because he's innocent, he doesn't think he was persecuted because he's half-caste, because people aren't like that. Where did this blind optimism come from? Gaw, you're an idiot George, and for that you paid the price.

Yet the ignoramus that is George is nothing to how Barnes portrayed Conan Doyle. So now we're onto the Arthur problem if you're keeping score. If you know a bit about Conan Doyle a lot of his life story here will be repetitive. In order to break out of this Barnes makes the odd decision that he will tear down this legend. He will make Arthur human and fallible and the butt of jokes, re the premature ejaculation mentioned above. Arthur is obsessed with his image and Jean, the woman who will become his second wife. He comes across as three things, girl crazy, sports crazy, and honor crazy. Here's the thing though, Barnes stresses the crazy. He spends hundreds and hundreds of pages stressing the crazy, which, OK, if you have some weird vendetta against Conan Doyle, I can see doing that. But then in the final section of the book he then does a 180 and builds Conan Doyle back up. That he was a great writer, humanitarian, etc. etc. I just don't know what the point of the book was I guess. If it was insight into these two men, it's a fail. If it's insight into miscarriages of justice, well, it's a fail also. Why, ugh, I just don't get it. My mind is literally rebelling wanting to know the why of it. This could have been a cute and insightful book on the author of Sherlock Holmes taking up the mantle of detective and saving a man's reputation. Instead it's an overwritten mess about the author of Sherlock Holmes misguidedly playing detective to distract himself from the fact that he can't yet marry and fuck the woman he's lusted after for a decade. Crime solving as prophylactic! I really don't think Holmes would approve.

There is so much that could be forgiven though if Barnes had been willing to tie up loose ends. In particular, the hate mail and the ripping. But instead we get 40 pages of George's shallow reflections on the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In his brief afterward, Barnes states that there's a man never mentioned in this book who later claimed responsibility for the letters, no reason given, no analysis, nothing. Just a man years later who did this. Um, a little more please? Secondly, as for the ripping... we are given a very good idea of what could have happened with the Sharp boys, but no real answer. As George himself points out it's the same kind of circumstantial evidence that got him locked up. So yes, in life we have unresolved endings. Nothing is tied up nice and neat with a bow. But here's the thing about Arthur and George... it's FICTION! Barnes felt perfectly fine taking liberties with Arthur's dick, yet couldn't give us an ending worthy of Holmes? Instead we are left with this nebulous morass we have read that has left no real impression other then ew to the ejaculation. Was this some arty post-modern experiment to mimic the spiritualist belief of knowledge only after passing through the veil? Seriously, I could sit here all day making up reasons why this book is as it is. I could justify it, I could throw harsh vitriol on it, I could read so much into the text that it would make your head spin, because the book's narrative just lies there doing nothing that you could read whatever you want into it. But you know what? I've wasted enough time on this book and it wasn't worth it, so in the end, writing one more word...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Animals, Arthur and George, Arthur Conan Doyle, Crime, Death Comes to Pemberley, Fiction, George Edalji, Jekyll and Hyde, Julian Barnes, P.D. James, Persecution, Rudyard Kipling, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlocked

Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal
Published by: Tor
Publication Date: April 2nd, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Jane and Vincent have been recuperating at Long Parkmeade after the trials and tribulations they faced in France. Though spending so much time with Jane's family is hard on her, she can see it's excessively wearying for her husband. Luckily a commission in London means they are not long for the city. Jane though feels a tug of pity for her sister. Here is Melody, trapped far away from eligible bachelors and aging more and more with every passing season. Jane impulsively decides to help Melody by taking her with them to London. Jane and Vincent can work during the day and throw parties and go to receptions in their spare time so that Melody gets a chance at the happiness her sister has attained.

London though is in a state of upheaval. The unnaturally cold weather means that crops are failing and people are looking for someone to blame, and they focus on the Coldmongers, a subgroup within glamourists that dangerously use glamour outside the visible spectrum and therefore have a short life expectancy. There is also the Irish Question and lingering hostilities towards the French. Because of Jane and Vincent's notoriety as the Prince Regent's Glamourists as well as Vincent being the son of Lord Vebury, they soon are dragged into the world of politics and their entire life is on show for the world. Will they be able to save their marriage, England, and get Melody married? That might take a little magic to pull off.

Re-reading Without a Summer I think that I might have maligned the book too much previously. I felt like it was such a departure for the final forth of the book from everything that came before that it was a square peg in a round hole. It was waving at sharks and thinking of perhaps jumping over them. I was so focused on what annoyed me that I was over-analyzing everything and almost searching for faults when I should have been enjoying the narrative shift. Each of the five books in this series has embraced a different genre, so to speak. We started with the traditional Austenesque book, Shades of Milk and Honey, moved onto espionage and war with Glamour in Glass, later Valour and Vanity would embrace the heist genre, while here we have politics and all that entails, from court to courting if you will. While I'm not the biggest fan of courtroom dramas, always liking the first half-hour of Law and Order over the second, knowing that it was coming I was able to look at the book more objectively and realize that I loved it just as much as the others. See, I have learned to admit when I'm wrong, and that's a big step for me.

But I think my opinions on Regency court procedure were very much formed by my hatred of Death Comes to Pemberley. I know she's dead, but I can not ever forgive P.D. James for this book hinging on old obscure British laws and courtroom antics. This one book did more harm then anything previously to make me come to revile courtroom drama. The tropes of surprise witnesses, the fainting of women in the gallery, please. While the narrative of Without a Summer did naturally lead itself to court, did it really have to bring forward all the problems of Jane and Vincent's marriage into public view? Hinting at the lewdness of Jane occasionally wearing men's garb, and perhaps that was because of Vincent's sexual proclivities that made his father hire the prostitute for him that was the center of their earlier fight? Blah blah blah. While I know great worldbuilding takes everything and every aspect of society into consideration, I could have done with a little more magic and a lot less mundane martial law.

Moving on from what nagged me let's embrace that which delights me. The true history being magically woven into this alternate history was staggeringly good. It's not just the bigger changes that captured my imagination, but the little ones, the fact that the battle of Waterloo never happened so that Waterloo Bridge is now Quatre Bras Bridge was a nice little touch, and all down to the Vincents in their previous adventure. But I really loved how Kowal tied in the frigid temperatures of 1816, known as "The Year Without a Summer," into not just the politics of the book, but into people's belief systems. Just think, snow in summer? You'd be more then a little concerned with this now wouldn't you?

The average person doesn't grasp that weather can not be controlled by glamour. Therefore people look for a scapegoat to explain away this problem, and the Coldmongers make a perfect target. They are specialized glamourists who deal with temperature. Even other glamourists don't know much about what they do, only knowing how dangerous it is to mess with the elements of hot and cold. They are poor, they are not understood, and they make a far more logical scapegoat then a volcano half a world away, which was actually the true reason for these bizarre meteorological conditions. Plus, this generally accepted belief of their culpability means that Vincent's father is able to politically exploit the situation to his own gain. Just sheer genius. Or should I say evil genius if I'm talking about Lord Verbury?

Though what I think I didn't really get the first time I read this book is that it's heroine isn't Jane, it's Melody. I just thought that Jane had had a brain transplant and that Melody was awesome. It never dawned on me that this was on purpose. Jane comes across as a little bit of a naive bigot. I know Jane had a sheltered life and was a bit oblivious to things before the arrival of Vincent in her life... but there's naive and then there's ignorance. All her opinions seemed to be based on "wild supposition instead of fact." She jumps to conclusions, has an obvious wariness of anyone Irish, despite the fact that she's working for them, and expresses astonishment at people of different skin colors. But what this does is gives Melody room to shine. Because while she has always been "the pretty one" somehow Jane hijacked her story.

In Shades of Milk and Honey Melody didn't get a HEA, she got stuck in the country with her parents while her sister got freedom and love. Melody has only ever been valued for her looks. It's nice to have our preconceptions turned on their heads. Melody has developed in other ways, she knows about current events and politics. She doesn't care that glasses will mare her beautiful face so long as she can see. She has taken her inability to excel at certain things, like glamour, and developed her mind to compensate. Melody has evolved into this strong independent woman and if Jane looks a little bad in comparison, well, think how Melody has felt all these years being valued only for her beauty? Just another stereotype exploded in artful fashion by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 1816, Battle of Waterloo, Coldmongers, Death Comes to Pemberley, Glamour, Glamour in Glass, Irish, Jane Vincent, Kindle, Mary Robinette Kowal, Mr. Vincent, P.D. James, Regency Magic, Without a Summer

Clouds of Witness (Lord Peter Wimsey Book 2) by Dorothy L. Sayers
Published by: Harper Torch
Publication Date: 1926
Format: Paperback, 288 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Lord Peter is taking some time off in Corsica. He has been incommunicado for some time. Therefore it is quite a surprise to him on arriving in Paris to find his older brother's name splashed across the front of the papers. Gerald has been arrested for murder! For once Lord Peter can show Gerald that his "lurid hobby" might be of some use to the family. Rushing back to England Lord Peter is fighting against the passing of time and the fact that the inquest has already happened. The family was in Riddlesdale, Yorkshire, where Gerald had rented out a lodge for hunting. Peter and Gerald's younger sister Mary was playing hostess and her fiance, Denis Cathcart was the victim of foul play.

Yet the motive for Gerald killing Cathcart is absurdly flimsy. Supposedly Gerald found out about Cathcart being a cardsharp and told him to leave. Why this should result in murder makes no sense. But Gerald is being obdurate. He will not tell where he was or what he was doing that night. The fact that Mary is also lying soon becomes obvious. With his own family obfuscating the truth, Lord Peter takes many a wrong turn, some into very boggy situations, before he heroically saves the day.

Me and Lord Peter have come to a bit of an understanding with this latest volume. Firstly, I didn't at any time want to hurl it across the room and I would only grumble about the stupid title every hour or so, not constantly. Clouds of Witness is one of those awkwardly titled books, I keep wanting to say "Clouds of Whiteness"... because, clouds, generally speaking, are white. If the title actually was the line used in the book "cloud of witnesses" that might have worked better, but still, awkward and will forever be a title I mangle. Back to me not hating Peter so much. Sure, most of the problems of the previous volume still proliferated, but the crime itself was far more interesting. In fact, I might have said I actually liked this book if the end of it hadn't gotten so bogged down in Gerald's trial that I was lost in a morass of legalese of outmoded British laws. If there is only one thing British I could be said to hate it's outmoded British courtroom dramas, this being the second worse perpetrator, P.D. James being the queen with Death Comes to Pemberley.

What I don't get is Sayers's weird way of setting up the crime in this case. It is odd that we arrive with Peter after the crime is committed. Almost as if we where the police brought in after some time to get to the bottom of things. Usually when you have a traditional country house murder that is very familial you're there every step of the way. Here it's a very different and novel approach. I personally was left a little cold by it. By not being on the ground and in the trenches as it happened, I was unable to get a connection to these other characters. They were literally just people I read about not cared about, which is the difference between a so-so book and a great book. Also, if she was going to take this tack of following Peter, why does Sayers let Peter wander off and leave is in the dark? She contradicts herself by changing her narrative style, especially at the end when Peter dramatically enters the House of Lords and lays out the case. If she had stayed true to the earlier half of the book we could have followed Peter and then curtailed the drawn out court case... just saying...

My big complaint of the previous volume was that you can't really tell one character from another, them all having, basically, the same voice. She seemed to have gotten this criticism at the time as well because she laboriously tries to make the Yorkshire natives "real" with a weird dialect that doesn't really work. I mean, yes, it's kind of funny because it's Jeeves and Wooster meets Wuthering Heights... but it just came across as not quite right and just another thing slightly wrong that made the book less whole. I also think I understand why Lord Peter annoys me. The way he's written he talks like he's speaking gibberish, like a 1920s version of Doctor Who. Sure it can be funny, and far more enjoyable if you picture Matt Smith as Lord Peter, but in the end, it's tiring trying to pick out the important bits of information from his verbal diarrhea. A forty minute show is one thing, and 300 page novel is another. Once again I shall lament the need for editors and move onto another book... hopefully this one without an author who assumes the reader is fluent in French... a common misconception of writers at the time... damn you Sayers and Mitford!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Clouds of Witness, Death Comes to Pemberley, Doctor Who, Dorothy L. Sayers, French, Golden Summer, Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Peter Wimsey, Matt Smith, Nancy Mitford, P.D. James, Wuthering Heights

Death Comes to Pemberly by P.D. James
Published by: Knopf
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Elizabeth and Darcy have been married for some time. Theirs is a happy life. Despite any reservations Darcy had about his wife, she rose to each and every challenge. She runs the household and Pemberley with the love and respect of her staff and family, which already has two healthy little boys. Her sister, Jane, lives a short distance away and comes to Pemberley often with her husband Bingley. The household is in a massive upheaval in preparation for their annual ball which was a tradition of Darcy's mother, and which the family still upholds. The night before the ball has the family gathered together, Jane and Bingley have arrived early to help Elizabeth and Georgiana with the preparations, as well as Georgiana's two suitors, her cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and an up-and-coming barrister, Alveston. What happens that night as they go to bed will change the lives of everyone present. Lydia arrives unexpectedly saying that Wickham and Denny are wandering in the woods and one of them is possibly dead, her and the coachman having heard gunshots. This being Lydia, she isn't that concise, or coherent, but the gist is understood.

Going into the depths of the forest, Wickham is found alive and crouching over the lifeless form of Denny. Wickham, despite initial incoherence, declares his innocence. But it's not that easy claiming innocence above the corpse of your friend who you've just argued with. The following days and months are spent in endless waiting. What will happen to Wickham? What really happened in those woods? Are they cursed? Will the shades of Permberley be thus polluted?

PD James is the mistress of mystery, the dame of death, the final word in her genre. Therefore I was expecting a lot more. I don't know why I should let myself get these high expectations, they are almost always crushed... but there you go, one of my many character flaws. Though I suspect PD of a greater character flaw, a Wickham sympathiser. I could not get ride of this nagging feeling the entire book that she didn't much care for Darcy and Elizabeth (who where woefully underused and also felt guilt towards Wickham) and really liked Wickham, who was given a lifestyle in youth that his true station in life could never support. Boo freakin' hoo. I bought this book for one purpose only, to see Wickham get what he deserves. A creeping leech who worms his way into peoples hearts and has been unrepentant in his ways all these many years. Yes, I know he's a fictional character, but unlike Willoughby, he had NO REMORSE!

Die Wickham, die! Which sadly, did not happen. But the whole mystery itself, aside from my Wickham issues was lackluster. I'm pretty decent at figuring mysteries out. Sometimes I don't try and I let myself enjoy the ride of reading the book, but not here. Here I was beat over the head with the clues so I couldn't avoid them. Heavy-handed foreshadowing indeed! I won't spoil it, but when PD went into a bit too much detail about certain "new" characters as well as a certain canines resting place, you should be able to put two and two together. If there had been some little twist, some little something, more fear, more gore, perhaps it would have taken this book beyond a cosy to something more enjoyable. Instead it seemed PD was more interested in the court proceedings of the day than actually creating suspense.

Of course I must handle the elephant in the room. There is a certain pressure of writing Austen. Books fall into two camps, the homage and the direct continuation. I personally like the homage. There's more fun to be hand, there's more you can do and there's less chance that you will attract the ire of Janites. Authors like Lauren Willig have successfully written with the flavor and time period of Austen without desecrating the hallowed six. Death Comes to Pemberley is of the second more dangerous camp and she creates a major fly in the ointment before the first page ends, with mistakenly referring to the odious Mr. Collins as Mr. Bennet's nephew. Um, no. Check your facts. He is a cousin. So step one, get your facts right, totally out the window. Then PD tries to jokingly/cleverly put in allusions to two other books in Austen's cannon. The first joke, about Wickham working for the Elliot's was very funny and you could see it as a possibility in some weird literature mash-up. But the second joke bringing in Emma, fell totally flat and seemed too much of a contrivance versus some little bit of fun on the side. True Janites should avoid this book like the plague. But if you're more of a causal Austen fan and aren't very good with the foreshadowing, go for it, it does have a pretty cover and the supporting characters that weren't in Pride and Prejudice are fun.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Darcy, Death Comes to Pemberley, Jane Austen, P.D. James, Pride and Prejudice, Wickham

Death Comes to Pemberly by P.D. James
Published by: Knopf
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"A rare meeting of literary genius: P. D. James, long among the most admired mystery writers of our time, draws the characters of Jane Austen’s beloved novel Pride and Prejudice into a tale of murder and emotional mayhem.

It is 1803, six years since Elizabeth and Darcy embarked on their life together at Pemberley, Darcy’s magnificent estate. Their peaceful, orderly world seems almost unassailable. Elizabeth has found her footing as the chatelaine of the great house. They have two fine sons, Fitzwilliam and Charles. Elizabeth’s sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live nearby; her father visits often; there is optimistic talk about the prospects of marriage for Darcy’s sister Georgiana. And preparations are under way for their much-anticipated annual autumn ball.

Then, on the eve of the ball, the patrician idyll is shattered. A coach careens up the drive carrying Lydia, Elizabeth’s disgraced sister, who with her husband, the very dubious Wickham, has been banned from Pemberley. She stumbles out of the carriage, hysterical, shrieking that Wickham has been murdered. With shocking suddenness, Pemberley is plunged into a frightening mystery.

Inspired by a lifelong passion for Austen, P. D. James masterfully re-creates the world of Pride and Prejudice, electrifying it with the excitement and suspense of a brilliantly crafted crime story, as only she can write it."

The queen of crime writing a Jane Austen murder, I bet everyone is over the freakin' moon about this one!

The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith
Published by: Pantheon
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 272 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"In this latest installment of the beloved Isabel Dalhousie series, our inquisitive heroine helps a new friend discover the identity of her father.

Isabel and her fiancé know who they are and where they come from. But not everybody is so fortunate. Jane Cooper, a visiting Australian philosopher on sabbatical in Edinburgh, has more questions than answers. Adopted at birth, Jane is trying to find her biological father, but all she knows about him is that he was a student in Edinburgh years ago. When she asks for Isabel’s help in this seemingly impossible search . . . well, of course Isabel obliges.

But Isabel also manages to find time for her own concerns: her young son, Charlie, already walking and talking; her housekeeper, Grace, whose spiritualist has lately been doubling as a financial advisor; her niece Cat’s latest relationship; and the pressing question of when and how Isabel and Jamie should finally get married.

Should the forgotten affairs of youth be left in the past, or can the memories help us understand the present? In her inimitable way, Isabel leads us to a new understanding of the meaning of family."

Yeah for new Alexander McCall Smith... though one must wonder, how does one man write so much and of such a high quality?

The Villa of Death by Joanna Challis
Published by: Minotaur
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Young Daphne du Maurier must defend of a friend who has been accused of murder in this next installment in the beguiling mystery series that readers of Rebecca will love.

t's the summer of 1927, and young Daphne du Maurier has traveled to Thornleigh Manor to attend the wedding of her good friend, Ellen, who is set to marry her beau, Teddy. Having met in the midst of the chaos and calamity of wartime, the lovers were brutally separated years before by family objections, but have since reunited. But when Teddy is found murdered just after the wedding, and Ellen is accused of the crime, Daphne and the dashing Major Browning must uncover the truth before all is lost."

The newest in Challis' series about a young Daphne Du Maurier. Also, the newest in the trend to have real life mystery writers be involved in murders, which is an interesting sub-genre. Look at the Upson Tey books.

Foul Play at Four by Steve Heller and Louise Fili
Published by: Berkley
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
" "New in the series that's "a must for British cozy fans"
Lois Meade has worked through all the days of the week, turning up clues and scrubbing up messes and murderers in the village of Long Farnden. But sleuthing is rarely a spotless endeavor...

A series of robberies have begun to plague Long Farnden, and Lois's own daughter, Josie, is shaken when a thief makes off with a hundred pounds from the till in her grocery shop. But before her policeman fiancé can crack the case, someone cracks Lois's husband on the head when he interrupts a burglary in progress. Now Lois-and the besotted Inspector Cowgill-must determine who's cleaning out Long Farnden, and clean up after an increasingly violent crime spree..."

The newest in one of my mom's favorite series, that I should say isn't written by M.C. Beaton. She love sher M.C. Beaton.

Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 528 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"In the magical underworld of Victorian London, Tessa Gray has at last found safety with the Shadowhunters. But that safety proves fleeting when rogue forces in the Clave plot to see her protector, Charlotte, replaced as head of the Institute. If Charlotte loses her position, Tessa will be out on the street—and easy prey for the mysterious Magister, who wants to use Tessa’s powers for his own dark ends.

With the help of the handsome, self-destructive Will and the fiercely devoted Jem, Tessa discovers that the Magister’s war on the Shadowhunters is deeply personal. He blames them for a long-ago tragedy that shattered his life. To unravel the secrets of the past, the trio journeys from mist-shrouded Yorkshire to a manor house that holds untold horrors, from the slums of London to an enchanted ballroom where Tessa discovers that the truth of her parentage is more sinister than she had imagined. When they encounter a clockwork demon bearing a warning for Will, they realize that the Magister himself knows their every move—and that one of their own has betrayed them.

Tessa finds her heart drawn more and more to Jem, though her longing for Will, despite his dark moods, continues to unsettle her. But something is changing in Will—the wall he has built around himself is crumbling. Could finding the Magister free Will from his secrets and give Tessa the answers about who she is and what she was born to do?

As their dangerous search for the Magister and the truth leads the friends into peril, Tessa learns that when love and lies are mixed, they can corrupt even the purest heart."

More Clare, more steampunk, go enjoy!

You Might As Well Die by J.J. Murphy
Published by: Allworth Press
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Paperback, 212 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"When second-rate illustrator Ernie MacGuffin's artistic works triple in value following his apparent suicide off the Brooklyn Bridge, Dorothy Parker smells something fishy. Enlisting the help of magician and skeptic Harry Houdini, she goes to a séance held by MacGuffin's mistress, where Ernie's ghostly voice seems hauntingly real..."

I've really been looking forward to this book. I mean really really! Plus, it's kind of what this month is about....

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
Published by: Everyman's Library
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 1144 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"The only hardcover omnibus of the best-selling and award-winning fantasy trilogy, in a Contemporary Classics edition.

Philip Pullman's trilogy is a masterpiece that transcends genre and appeals to readers of all ages. His heroine, Lyra, is an orphan living in a parallel universe in which science, theology, and magic are entwined. The epic story that takes us through the three novels is not only a spellbinding adventure featuring armored polar bears, magical devices, witches, and daemons, it is also an audacious and profound reimagining of Milton's Paradise Lost that has already inspired a number of serious books of literary criticism. Like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis before him, Pullman has invented a richly detailed and marvelously imagined world, complex and thought-provoking enough to enthrall adults as well as younger readers. An utterly entrancing blend of metaphysical speculation and bravura storytelling, His Dark Materials is a monumental and enduring achievement."

Beautiful new omnibus, which I don't really need... who am I kidding, I'll be getting it anyway.

The World of Downton Abbey by Jessica Fellowes
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"A lavish look at the real world--both the secret history and the behind-the-scenes drama--of the spellbinding Emmy Award-winning Masterpiece TV series Downton Abbey

April 1912. The sun is rising behind Downton Abbey, a great and splendid house in a great and splendid park. So secure does it appear that it seems as if the way it represents will last for another thousand years. It won't.


Millions of American viewers were enthralled by the world of Downton Abbey, the mesmerizing TV drama of the aristocratic Crawley family--and their servants--on the verge of dramatic change. On the eve of Season 2 of the TV presentation, this gorgeous book--illustrated with sketches and research from the production team, as well as on-set photographs from both seasons--takes us even deeper into that world, with fresh insights into the story and characters as well as the social history."

Downton! I must know all there is to know! I want to live there and meet the people, yes I know they're not real.... oh my, I think I'm in Downton withdrawl. Do they have drugs to help this, or do I just need to watch it over and over again?

The Tiny Book fo Tiny Stories by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Published by: It Books
Publication Date: December 6th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 88 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"HitRECord’s collaborative coalition of artists and writers are making history with The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1, a collection of innovative crowd-sourced creative projects that pushes the limits of originality, cooperation, imagination, and inspiration. HitRECord, a grassroots creative collective founded by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, known worldwide for his performances in (500) Days of Summer and Inception, is a forum where thousands of artists worldwide share work and contribute to their peers’ projects in writing, music, videos, illustration, and beyond. Alongside Dean Haspiel’s ACT-I-VATE, a groundbreaking comics collective, and the photographer JR’s Inside Out Project, hitRECord is a haven for budding creatives. Now, the collective has edited together its most promising stories and illustrations to serve as its face in introducing the world to a new generation of talent, in The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories."

Don't care what it is, Tommy from 3rd Rock has written a book! Yes, he will always be Tommy to me.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alexander McCall Smith, Ann Purser, Cassandra Clare, Daphne Du Maurier, Dorothy Parker, Downton Abbey, J.J. Murphy, Jane Austen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, P.D. James, Philip Pullman